This week we have been in Brumado, Brazil for our Gospel Event here which starts tonight. We have been conducting a Soul Winning Seminar this week. Our team has been preaching in the local Secondary schools. So many precious young people have made decisions for Christ. Last night, I spoke at the closing session at our Soul Winning Seminar on the Power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God moved so powerfully. At the close of the service a young man came up to me and asked me if I could lead him in a prayer to receive Christ as His Saviour. It’s harvest time in Brazil, so humbling to see the hand of God moving mightily in this nation.
When the fire and power of the Holy Spirit is poured out, people respond to it! I have found this to be true in so many nations. People are hungry for the reality of God. When they witness the power of God demonstrated, they respond to the gospel. When Paul and Silas were in prison in Acts 16, they began to sing and the whole jail was shaken by God’s power. The jailer cried out “What must I do to be saved?’ (Acts 16:30)
It’s similar to the account of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Matthew 27:54 tells us “When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” When people encounter the raw power of God and witness the miracles of God, it challenges them! It causes them to question the foundations of their unbelief!
The Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:4-5 “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.” Paul understood that the key to convincing people of God’s reality was not through persuasion, but through God’s power!
I want to share Charles Finney’s conversion experience with you as a final thought today. “I was powerfully converted on the morning of the 10th of October, 1821,” writes Charles. G. Finney, “In the evening of the same day, I received overwhelming baptisms of the Holy Ghost that went through me, as it seemed to me, body and soul. I immediately found myself endued with such power from on high that a few words dropped here and there to individuals were the means of their immediate conversion. My words seemed to fasten like barbed arrows in the souls of men. They cut like a sword. They broke the heart like a hammer. Multitudes can attest to this. Oftentimes a word dropped without my remembering, it would fasten conviction and often result in almost immediate conversion.”
Charles Finney was endued with the power of the Holy Spirit to the extent that just a few words would convict an unsaved person and bring them immediately to a place of conversion. This Friday it’s my prayer that God would do the same for you. That you would receive so much of God’s fire and power and be a tremendous and powerful witness for Christ. That God would so set you on fire people would be drawn to you like a moth to a flame and be drawn to the love and power of the Savior!
